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Richard J. Evans lauds a masterly account of deadly evacuations in the last months of the Third Reich.
The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide
By Daniel Blatman, translated by Chaya Galai
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 592pp, Pounds 24.95
ISBN 9780674050495
Published 27 January 2011
In the final months of the Third Reich, as the Allied armies approached Germany, the regime began to evacuate the 715,000 prisoners held in concentration camps. Most of the inmates were being used as forced labour for the German war economy, although under conditions deliberately engineered to weaken and eventually kill them: the Nazis even had a specific term for this, Vernichtung durch Arbeit, "annihilation through work".
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, under whose aegis the camp administration fell, hoped to use the prisoners for work away from the encroaching front, but the SS also feared that the approach of hostile forces might encourage uprisings and mass breakouts. The evacuations began a year before the end of the war, with the transportation of prisoners from Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, which was entered by the Red Army in the summer of 1944. As the Reich came closer to collapse, the evacuations gathered pace, continuing right up to the eve of the surrender in early May 1945.
By the time the war was over, between a third and a half of the 715,000 were dead. Many, left behind in the camps to assist with the clearing up and where possible destruction and concealment of the facilities, had been shot on completing their task. Others died after liberation, too weak, ill or emaciated to survive.
But at least 250,000 perished in the course of the evacuations, which were carried out hastily in unheated and unprovisioned cattle trucks, on lorries and horse-drawn wagons, or most commonly on foot. SS guards shot stragglers or beat them to death if they were unable to keep up with the others, while large numbers of prisoners died of starvation and hypothermia in the bitter winter conditions with which the great majority had to contend.
As the Reich descended into chaos, the guards sometimes had to halt the marches and double back, their way blocked by enemy troops; often lacking clear instructions, they frequently...